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Obama announces 2014 budget

Boehner, Cantor not impressed

POLITICO Roundtable: Obama, GOP like Venus, Mars

Obama’s budget offers some clues about where his head is on policy. Here are POLITICO’s top five budget takeaways:

Obama’s top priority isn’t a grand bargain

Going once, going twice … not sold. The White House has presented the budget as a final offer on deficit reduction, but it’s the same one Republicans rejected last December. The president said it’s already a “compromise,” so he’s leaving no room for negotiation.

The tactic suggests the White House isn’t optimistic that a “grand bargain” is within reach — at least not on terms the GOP will buy.

The president’s trying to send the message that he’s the one who offered a “compromise,” as he said in the Rose Garden roll out Wednesday, and that it’s Republicans who are uncompromising.

But House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan lamented the lack of ambition in Obama’s budget. “The President’s budget is such a disappointment because it’s a missed opportunity,” the Wisconsin Republican said. “We need a new approach to meet our generation’s most pressing challenges. I hope the other side will join us in proposing real reforms.”

Hopeful, but not confident.

It doesn’t kill the mood

Perhaps the best way to view Obama’s budget is in the context of the charm offensive he’s launched on Capitol Hill.

While the budget might not lead to a deficit deal, it helps maintain the more cooperative environment Obama has been cultivating this year. It was largely free of the kind of major new initiatives that fuel partisan warfare, and it didn’t take the issues he might be able to get something done on — gun-control and immigration reform — out of the news.

When Obama sits down to dinner with a group of Senate Republicans on Wednesday night, none of them should feel the need to give him a piece of their mind over one provision or another.

And there’s even a sweetener or two buried in its pages. Obama offered up Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp’s “mark to market” financial derivatives plan as part of his own tax reform proposal, for example.